


no grave can hold my body down

by bugeys



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Horror, M/M, Religion, Trans Daryl Dixon (Background)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 16:08:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30058059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugeys/pseuds/bugeys
Summary: The crunch of Merle’s skull under Daryl’s heel was a relief he wished he could have been spared.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Kudos: 6





	no grave can hold my body down

_ You hold love in your hand, a red seed _

_ you had forgotten you were holding. _

The crunch of Merle’s skull under Daryl’s heel was a relief he wished he could have been spared.

Merle Dixon dies not once, not twice. He dies three times, maybe four. He dies on top of a building in Atlanta. His ghost is ripped apart, though it was never truly there, in the forest south of the Greene farm. He dies during his weak attempt at redemption. And he dies, for a final time, under Daryl’s foot, as he feasts on a corpse with his true brethren.

Daryl bowes gently into Carol’s embrace, hidden in a quiet corner of the prison, her fingers dragging kindly along his sweaty forehead and brushing strands of hair out of his eyes. She murmurs quiet, sweet things, shielding him from view of any passersby. He remembers the snip of kitchen scissors, his throat dry with secondhand smoke and the smell that overtakes houses when they begin to rot.  _ Baby, _ his mama whispers.  _ My babygirl. _ She sets the scissors down and takes to braiding what hair is left.  _ God’s got big plans for you, I know he does _ . 

Their daddy never gave God a second thought, not after mama died. He never felt giving thanks was worth waiting an extra moment before eating dinner. Merle didn’t pay attention to the concept either, other than actively dismissing it.  _ And if God were real _ , fourteen-year old Merle had said, sitting lopsided in the back of a pickup truck,  _ then it was His hand that let our mama’s cigarette set fire to the bedding. _ And, like in so many things, Daryl had followed suit.

Now, it is in this strange irony of atheism in the backroads of Georgia, that Merle’s grave— wholly for show, his body left to rot a few miles away— is marked with a cross, of all things. 

Gravemarkers have, in a fashion similar to the arts and crafts that take up time in “old folk’s,” homes, become a job for the slow and lazy members of the prison. All ex-citizens of Woordbury, a few genuinely crippled, but most stuck living in the slick ooze of life  _ before _ . Too afraid to cock a gun; too sentimental to ask for help. They make gravemarkers and take up space and eat too much food and the most unkind parts of Daryl don’t even flinch when resentment boils up his throat like stomach acid at the sight of them.

But it’s a good thing to do, the right thing— keeping them, helping them, treating them like stray dogs, in that they share no responsibility for their predicament. Carol reassures him, sometimes that the new version of himself Daryl has managed to unearth is a kind person. But when that sourness prickles his esophagus at the sight of well-fed stomachs, he can’t help but doubt her affirmations.

Religion is left lacksidesical, at least. No one bothers with it, outside of the gravemarkers. Privately, Daryl thinks there might finally be some use in the concept, despite its growing lack of cultural relevance. He sees it in those soft stomachs, and in the famished ones, and feels it in that boiling, angry bitterness. For all the hate that bled from religion around him growing up, Christ was supposed to be  _ good _ .  _ Good _ like their inner group,  _ good _ like Maggie’s fingers brushing against Daryl’s back, or Glenn squeezing a hug in after one too many expired beers, or in Rick. It’s cheap to see God in someone else, cheap like men singing country songs about girls whose hair reaches past their ass and whose skin glitters like dust on a sunny day. But Daryl sometimes thinks, anyways, that God is there, in Rick’s hands in particular. In the dirt he brushes off them, and the life he births from them.

The goodness imbued in his body draws Daryl as much as the man himself, whose bones seem to snap and creak with grief every time they move. Everything he does suggests it— he double laces his boots and grips Daryl’s forearm in comfort and presses greasy lips to his daughter’s forehead. The grief and kindness in Rick’s wiry, underfed body pools in Daryl’s chest and slips from the corners of his eyes when he gets too close. 

Daryl watches Rick garden for ten minutes before he lifts his hip from the chainlink and puts his cigarette out on the side of his left thumb. The sensation is dull, barred by years worth of toughened scar tissue. He grinds the butt into the cement and unlocks the prison yard’s gate, stepping into soft, calf-high grass.

The garden which Rick has spent so many hours tending to, often with Hershel at his side or sitting in the sun with his crutches on his lap, doesn’t provide enough food to fully replace hunting and supply runs. However, no one can deny that it helps— as a mood-booster, if nothing else. Beans lie limply on stakes in the section of the yard that gets shade in the afternoon, while leafy vegetables line neat little rows nearby. Daryl has little interest in digging his fingers into the earth, let alone growing things, but Rick told him the names of the plants anyway, and Daryl had succumbed quietly, simply enjoying the other man’s voice; revelling in the fact that he cared enough to tell. As such, Daryl knows that it is mustard plants and broccoli flowers that color the yard a sickly yellow, swiss chard staining bloody patches of red amidst queen anne’s lace and chickweed.

He returns to the present, ending the recitation of plants within him and approaching Rick, purposefully alerting the other man to his presence by snapping a twig under his boot before pressing a hand gently to Rick’s shoulder. He’s bent down, in the middle of pulling up a clump of dandelions. The sight of soil sticking to his pores, rather than gun oil or blood or the black grease that smears off of rotting human corpses is infinitely comforting, and Rick smiles at Daryl, locking the feeling into place. 

“Need something?”

“Just offering some help. If you want. You’re gonna get burnt if you stay out here in the sun much longer.” 

“I’ll tell Michonne to get some sunscreen next time she goes out.” Rick says with a quirk to his upper lip, wiping sweat off his brow.

They settle into a dull and quiet pace together, pulling weeds in the three o’clock afternoon heat, sweat prickling at the softer parts of Daryl’s stomach and arms, dirt making itself at home under the remnants of his raw-bitten nails. Eventually, Rick points out the large swaths of chickweed which have begun to encroach onto their makeshift graveyard in the southern corner. Daryl stares for a moment, imagining it: the plants living and feeding on dirt, made up partially of people. People who were loved, once.

They shift their attention from weeding to the chickweed specifically, pulling it up in handfuls and throwing the bunches into a white plastic bucket. It tastes watery and thin, but the plant is sustenance, nonetheless. Rick pauses before moving to disentangle it from a gravemarker, sitting back on his haunches and staring absentmindedly at the sight. Daryl settles next to him, waiting hesitantly.

Rick simply turns to look at him, pressing a stray lock of Daryl’s hair back behind his ear and out of his face. Its grown long, curling past his shoulders, and he keeps it tied up with one of Beth’s old hairbands, decorated by a pattern of cherries on yellowed fabric. Daryl simply gives him a mild scowl before pulling the strand back into his ponytail and gingerly tugging at a vine which had meandered to the T of a nearby cross. 

Suddenly the other man starts, standing up abruptly, and Daryl’s hand flashes to his back but his crossbow is across the yard, lying against chain link, so he grasps the pocketknife tucked in his sock and turns around to find the threat. He can’t pinpoint it until he looks down at the ground where Rick had been crouching. A hand, thin and gray and chapped, skin peeling off at the knuckles, grasps upwards to where Rick’s foot had been moments before.

“Jesus,” Daryl mutters under his breath, staring at the sight. Chickweed falls out of Rick’s grip besides him, falling amongst covetous fingers. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just…” Rick pulls at the side of his shoe, makes sure the chipped fingernails didn’t mark his flesh. “Someone must not have done it all the way.”

“I guess. Christ.”

Daryl stomps decidedly on the hand, burying the similarity of the scene to his heel cracking down on Merle’s skull somewhere deep within him, somewhere where the image won’t surface. The hand doesn’t stop moving, though its index finger decidedly sloughs off. They stand looking down at it for a moment, an underlying sense of horror dripping down Daryl’s throat and threatening to choke him, cloying and sickly. He leaves Rick to stare at the hand, regretfully grabbing the shovels lying somewhat akimbo at the edge of the graveyard.

“Here.” Daryl offers one of the shovels to Rick a moment later, placing a sticky hand onto the other man’s hip. His palm leaves a wet imprint on the fabric.

They take to digging with reluctance; the dirt around the head of the grave, disrupted, gives way and the wooden cross that had marked it falls onto the ground. The twine keeping the two roughly hewn cuts of wood together snaps, leaving it in pieces. 

After a few minutes, Daryl hits his mark: a dull crunching sound seeming to ring throughout the entire yard, making him cringe and Rick pause his digging. A few inches of his shovel went through the walker’s rotted chest cavity, and it oozes at them, black and sickly, framed by a pair of wilted breasts. It’s a nauseating image— a cruel combination of fertility and death. The fetor that rises from it is a combination of wet dirt and rot and it makes Daryl’s usually resilient gag reflex quiver. 

They work together to dig up the rest of the corpse, which continues to twitch its fingers, still grasping, until Daryl cracks through its skull with the tip of his shovel. When he pulls it up, it's decorated with that same dark ooze, and a clump of red hair. He lets the shovel drop to the ground.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it.”

The words seem to blur out of Rick’s mouth and warp Daryl’s chest. They pry open his lips, clashing at his jaw and working their way over his tongue, as though he was the one to blurt them out. He presses his hand to Rick’s side, uncaring of the second sweaty handprint he’ll leave on the other man’s shirt. His stomach has finally begun to show the workings of a healthy body: soft, less bony, warm. Daryl lets a sigh hiss out of his nose.

“I know.”

They’re drawn to it by the car horn, heavy and piercing in a wet, foggy morning, otherwise silent except for the crunch of dead leaves under Daryl and Rick’s boots. The moment it begins to shriek, both men swivel around and hike back up the hill they’d been heading down, without hesitation. A year or so ago, Daryl supposes, he’d have watched Rick run ahead of him, unwilling to run towards damage rather than away from it. But now, though, he keeps pace with the other man and flashes of his own family skirt the edge of his vision: If the sound lasts much longer it’ll draw every broken, bloated corpse in the vicinity to the prison. 

He comes to a halt after five minutes of sprinting and Rick almost trips into him, like a meager hunting dog. “Christ,” is all the other man mutters, taking in the sight.

The source of the sound is, as expected, a vehicle. A beat-up red pickup, specifically, almost brown with rust. Its driver is motionless, head on the steering wheel— dead weight pressing on the horn while a pile of flesh writhes and moans under its tires. Daryl aims quickly and easily pierces the driver’s head with an arrow, the impact knocking his head off of the horn and shutting off the noise. 

“Must’ve crashed on these geeks,” he proposes, sticking the point of an arrow through the heads of a few of them by hand. 

“Must have.” Rick agrees, and sticks his arm through the open window to unlock the door. There’s little inside, and nothing in the truck bed.

Daryl gestures for Rick to follow him, quietly approaching a building, which the truck had crashed right in front of. It’s nondescript: dark wood that smells faintly of mildew and paint thinner, very little decorating its exterior. There’s a porch, making it feel not unsimilar to a cheap vacationing cabin.

Rick presses against the wall next to the door, python in hand and hot breath making small bursts of mist in front of his mouth, contrasting the dewy wood on his cheek. Daryl nods at him and then drags the door open, pulling back with it as the other man rolls against the wall and aims his gun inside.

When Daryl glances inside, he’s instantly disappointed, and then confused. The space is small, and nearly empty, less the size of a home and more of a gas station. Its innards resemble its exterior, wetted planks and a cold breeze blowing in and out of sensation, the remains of pews flanking the room’s edges in pieces. The ceiling arches, following the angle of the exterior roofing. At the far end, away from the door, is a figure, arms outstretched, toes on a pedestal. Otherwise, the room is motionless, but for buckets lined up beneath the arms of the figure, which echo out a few inconsistent  _ plops _ every twenty seconds.

Daryl can see it for what it is: the remnants of a church. Something about the broken pews makes his stomach lurch. The figure, however, is less imposing: eight feet tall, made of a plasticky, turquoise colored material. It's remarkably similar to the image of Christ that made its home in the church near the Greene farm. That statue’s face had been kind, welcoming of Carol’s dependency and Daryl’s indifference.  _ This _ statue merely looks down at the floor of its church, lips pursed.

“What  _ is _ that?” Rick trails off, as Daryl slips by him, brushing a hand on his back as an indication for him to stay put. Liquid drips steadily off of strips of fabric-like strips, red and white, draped over Christ’s punished arms, from shoulder to wrist. Daryl lifts one of the strips on the shoulder, and it holds its shape, even preserving the bicep it had been laid over. He picks up a piece off of the wrist, too, but immediately flings the flesh away in disgust. Each piece is wetter— fresher— the closer they are to Christ’s wrists, all dripping ooze into the buckets line up beneath the statue’s arms. Something sweet and chewy makes a mouth in Daryl’s esophagus, lined with teeth that gnash and growl.

“I think they’re from walkers. Not people.” He says quietly, gingerly picking up another piece and walking back to Rick. The other man pulls away, looking revolted. “Look, y’ can tell it was decaying before it was put up there.” He knows Rick can tell— they’ve all learned to discern the living from the dead; the second death that makes flesh turn grey and green rather than pallad, purpling. 

Daryl drops the wet strip of walker-flesh onto the ground, grinds it into the planking with his boot’s heel, and wipes his fingers off on the edge of his vest. Bile rises in his stomach when he spots flowers carved into the remains of the pews out of the corner of his eye.

He lets Rick press against him, brushing his fingers against Daryl’s collar, pausing on his bra strap, offering a comfort disparate from the bloodstained fingers that Daryl rubs gently against the nape of the other man’s neck. Mama’s smile edges his vision and Daryl can hear her murmuring.  _ God’s everywhere, baby. He’s in me and he’s in you, he’s even in our strawberries.  _ Daryl had laughed at that one, popping another not quite ripe fruit into his mouth. 

His mama had been right.

_ But what you knew suddenly as you left your body _

_ cooling and whitening on the lawn  _

_ was that you love him anywhere, _

_ even in this land of no memory, _

_ even in this domain of hunger. _

_ — Margaret Atwood, Eurydice _


End file.
